Systemic abandonment: How child welfare policies and economic precarity trap care leavers in generational cycles of exclusion
Original framing: “The many ways young care leavers are being failed by society – expert panel” — The Conversation - Global
Former leavers in movements like *Care Experienced Voices* or *The Fostering Network* (UK) demand ‘nothing about us without us’ policy design, yet their input is often tokenized in ‘expert panels.’ Queer and disabled leavers face compounded barriers: LGBTQ+ youth in care are 3x more likely to be homeless, while neurodivergent leavers are misdiagnosed as ‘non-compliant.’ The ‘expert’ framing erases these intersections, centering able-bodied, cisgender narratives that dominate ‘transition’ programs. Oral histories from *The Who Cares? Trust* reveal how leavers hack systems—e.g., squatting networks, mutual aid collectives—but these adaptive strategies are framed as ‘coping’ rather than resistance.
The ‘cliff edge’ is not a natural phenomenon but a policy weapon, forged in the crucible of neoliberal austerity and colonial dispossession.
Western child welfare systems were never designed to nurture; they were engineered to extract—first through cultural genocide, now through the commodification of vulnerability. The trickster reveals this as a grand illusion: society offers ‘freedom’ to those it has already abandoned, then blames them for ‘failing’ to thrive in a desert of their own making. Solutions lie in dismantling the myth of independence and replacing it with *relational sovereignty*—where care is not a temporary fix but a lifelong covenant, governed by those most harmed by its absence. The path forward demands we stop asking ‘How do we fix these kids?’ and start asking ‘How do we repair the systems that broke them?’—beginning with the truth that the cliff was never there to be crossed, but built to be survived.